"Panoayan"

Arriving at the new hacienda...

[ beginning on page 39, Hunger's Brides ]

I awoke just before Amanda did. A light rain tickled my face. The sun,
not far above the western hills, seemed lower than we were, as if the last
light rose up past us to strike the peaks far above, still radiantly lit.
Quietly we watched the soft rain beat traces of silver through the sunbeams
where they slanted up among the boughs.

The trees were thinning. We were
entering the town of Amecameca, less than a league from Grandfather's hacienda.
María and Josefa were standing up in the lead cart, gawping shamelessly
at the refinements of the largest settlement we had ever seen, and would
traverse in under five minutes. Xochitl pointed out the school. "For
girls like you." She looked at me with a crooked smile.

Then we were off the main road. The
track bent sharply east. A gold light poured over our shoulders and cast
ahead of us the shadow of a giant with two tiny heads - for Amanda and
I were standing now, behind the driver. As we clung to his backrest, Xochitl
clung grimly to our skirts to keep us from pitching headlong out. Across
the ditch on the left and beyond a windbreak of oaks were orchard rows
of apple and peach and pomegranate converging in the distance as they ran.
Workers stopped and doffed their hats as Grandfather cantered grandly past.
Close to the road, one woman squinted at Xochitl and waved with a little
flutter.

I looked back. She stood there still,
the sun setting red beside her through folds of road dust.

Closer to the house were plots of
squash, and beans and tomatoes. We crossed a small, stone bridge over a
brook that fed the irrigation ditches. At the far end of the bridge stood
a little guard post, empty now. As was the watchtower that topped the house.
The house itself was framed by two tall African tulip trees, and in each
orange blossom glowed the sunset's radiant echo.

As in Nepantla, the house was laid
out on one floor. Here, though, the roof was not flat but shingled and
pitched to shed rain - and, Grandfather promised, sometimes snow.

The western wall above the veranda
was a pocked grey white. The watchtower and the chapel belfry still blushed
the softest rose in the faltering light. Workmen in white cotton breeches
and shirts took form round the carts as if exhalations risen of the dusk...